BEAUTY SHOP TALK

by

Vicki Charmaine Bunch

Fame is a seductive thing. "Venomous victory," I called it, when I won the Axel Race for Dates in 1969 and the five guys I was going steady with found out about each other.

As a member of MENSA, I've been paying close attention to the announcement of the 1997 Nobel Prize recipients. Average everyday eggheads like you and me, slaving over a strain of DNA, they get THE CALL, the call that says, "Life will never be the same."

The winner's friends think, "Madame Curie's getting a little too big for her britches," and quit inviting her over to watch Jeopardy. Meanwhile, the guy who had the Bunsen burner next to hers in freshman chemistry--the guy who always set his hair on fire--appears out of nowhere with a scheme to make beer out of used tires.

Then the stockbroker who mistook her for a valet at her sister's wedding reception calls to invite her to Las Vegas for the weekend. All of a sudden, Dr. Genius is hot snot. A stud magnet with irresistible dipole force.

An Important Message to Nobel Prize Winners: DON'T WIND UP LIKE ELVIS. Don't wind up in a spandex jump-suit throwing sweaty scarves to fans.

Do you want to wake up in a pile of broken Erlenmeyer flasks with a bad hangover? Scientists are extra vulnerable to Fame's intoxication because, generally speaking, they haven't partied much.

Look at these case histories. Chemists leave chairs at prestigious universities to start a band called the Doped Metalloids. Rival physicists at a Boston cocktail party get drunk and bombard one another with electrons. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Fungus is found facedown in a petri dish.

Stardom hits like a load of bricks and, before you know it, you can't even balance an equation.

Let us never forget D'Alphonse Fontaine, founder of the Axel Genius Society. When he won Cobb County's highest honor, the Academy Award for Physics, in 1953, it went to his head. He disappeared during the Fontaine Day parade and came to three days later barreling down a winding mountain road in Tennessee at the wheel of a truck loaded with TNT.

After his downfall, Fontaine never accelerated a single particle. Would you rather be remembered like Enrico Fermi, Max Planck and Niels Bohr or reviled like Fontaine?

Why do scientists need to party anyway? You're already way cooler than everybody else cause you get to use ray guns and robots and stuff. You can clone fine chicks and freeze yourself for future life.

Merrymaking is fraught with danger for the scientist. Groupies will suck you dry as a locust's exoskeleton and dump you for next year's trophy brain. When fate smiles at you, take an aspirin and go to bed.

My advice is SIMMER DOWN. Stick to your monotonous routine as much as possible, avoid chills, and drink plenty of fluids. Trick the death cell.

When wheeler dealers and ne'er-do-wells show up on your doorstep, don't invite them into the lab for a dry martini and helium. Don't flash your photons like a two-bit whore. Dumb down. Act regular. Don't wind up like the King.